Temasek: on the telco trail again

Other than Shin, Temasek’s track record when buying stakes in Asian telcos has been very gd. The Indosat stake was sold in 2008 for a gain of a not peatnuty S$223 million.

So as a S’pores (remember that the CEO says that Temasek belongs to us), I’m glad to see that Temasek has in the last few weeks taken stakes in two other SE Asian telcos.

Singapore Technologies Telemedia (ST Telemedia) acquired a 33% stake in Malaysian 3G operator U Mobile, the two companies said in a joint statement last Monday week. ST Telemedia (a 100% Temasek subsidiary) is paying 625 million ringgit (US$189 million or S$263 million) for its stake in U Mobile. U Mobile is the smallest M’sian telco.

And in the previous week, ST Telemedia announced it was buying a 10% stake in VNPT Global, a subsidiary of Vietnam public telecommunications group VNPT. A VNPT official said the deal was valued at 20 billion dong, a peanuty S$1.5million (thereabouts) as Mrs SM might have put it (she didn’t)